You might also ask where your asleep-at-the-switch buddies in organized labor have been. Looks like they've been all too satisfied to bask in the empty-worded joy of being handed the fiefdom of the Department of Labor. It's more than your president who's gotten a little too comfy and wishy washy. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nice advice about how to use the left to help define the center. Frightening it is if our president actually needs to hear advice that basic. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's what to advocate for illegal immigrants: Free healthcare, education, and auto insurance financed by a special tax levied on all the industries known to employ them in significant numbers. Let those brilliant business tycoons start paying for all the misery their easy-money employment practices shuck off on the rest of society to clean up or put up with. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Those industries build illegal immigrants and the fantasy cost of employing them into their very business models, and they will be the first to put a halt to any true attempt to prevent illegals from coming here.

Mr. Cockburn,
This eloquently sums up what is becoming a dangerous problem that I fear will end in assassination on an attempt:
"Publicly interrupting the president to berate him as a liar is not done in the U.S. Congress, and Wilson swiftly apologized. But it was an emblem of something that most definitely did surface this summer: white race hatred for Obama. Wilson's uncouth outburst was a nasty reminder of how unrestrained this is swiftly becoming."
The office of the president has never been so openly disrespected nor its occupant so openly attacked, and it's getting worse. It's racism, pure and unadulterated, if such words can be applied to such appalling rhetoric and behavior. It would have been bad enough for Wilson to shout disagreement while the president is speaking; to yell "You lie!" at the president goes beyond the bounds, and the Democrats are right to demand an official apology. Official activities were in progress. Action against such crassness is a message to the GOP: "Cool down and show respect, or you will wish you had."
Now we have an Iowa Republican complaining, as he defends the the president a liar, that Mr. Obama hasn't appointed enough whites. Just how many old, fat, jowly white men will be enough?
What can we do to stop this tide of race hatred that may end in tragedy?
Free speech binds as well as frees; we cannot make people from member of Congress to the puppet Joe the Plumber stop their ever more disrespectful to threatening speech since they have the right to say what they want.
Perhaps it's time to tighten up on what can be considered "hate speech." That remark from one white Southern pol about an escaped gorilla being "one of Michelle's relatives" would qualify, it seems to me, as would the card with 43 presidents pictures of presidents on it and a black square with round white eyes finishing the display. The person who disseminated that was barely rebuked, when she should have been fired outright from the Republican organization for which she worked.
Yet it would seem petty to act against these people. and what a heyday the GOP would have with that.
I do think there's a possible solution to "hate radio" and "hate TV," and that it for the Democrats to set up nationwide listening posts to carefully assess the hatemongers' daily programs. We know who they are. We know the kind of things they say. I'm sure that daily analysis and compilation would reveal frequent violations of laws protecting against hate speech and just actions could ensue. It's one thing to dislike what someone says, but another to find the ways they say it are beyond decency and the rule of law.
I just this evening discovered this website, and yours is the first article I've read. It certainly won't be the last.

Re: bryony1: Tighten up on hate speech??? Oh boy, that'll get the right wingers more recruits than the left will ever hope to grab from Joe Wilson.